Lunch at Indika: of prix fixe & pork vindaloo

It’s Wednesday as I write, so I’m waiting for my weekly email from chef Anita Jaisinghani’s Indika with the menu for her Thursday and Friday prix fixe lunch special. The three-course meal is $22, and it often sounds like one of the most interesting meals in town. Yet however much I enjoy hearing what Jaisinghani has up her sleeve, I never got around to trying one of her lunch specials until recently. The food proved to be even more exciting than I had imagined.

Alison Cook

Taro & pea cutlets with cucumber raita, Indika prix fixe lunch 8/26.

Prix-fixe lunch deals come in several varieties. (It’s pronounced “pree feeks” in French, just for the record.) There’s the time-sensitive “businessman’s lunch,” often but not always coupled with bargain pricing. Some restaurants use the two-or-three-course, complete meal format to introduce diners to scaled-back versions of regular menu items at a lower price point than they’d find at dinner, much as they do during Restaurant Week. Others use the noon hour to tempt regulars or first-time diners with special dishes that are in tryouts (Monica Pope’s Friday prix fixe at t’afia is one such) or seasonal, market-driven specials that may never find their way to the regular menu — which is what Jaisinghani does at Indika.

As rich as her regular menu is, Jaisinghani’s weekly lunch specials suggest the richness of regional Indian cookery even better. One week she might offer a dish wrapped in tropical taro leaves; another, a savory fried taro-root fritter laced with peas and aromatic seeds, served with a cool cucumber-and-yogurt raita. A shot of herbal green chutney underneath made the whole dish vibrate when I tried it. I even added a little of the tart-sweet-hot tamarind chutney that had come with complimentary papadums. Boom: my own crazy version of chaat, those hyperkinetic Indian snack creations.

Alison Cook

Complimentary pappadums with tamarind chutney, Indika.

I hated to see the last of my taro cutlets, but they fled my brain the minute a tower ofRevival Meats’ pastured pork vindaloo showed up. Teetering atop a steep hill of russet-tinged pork was a globe of yogurt-coconut rice crowned by a pickled red onion ring. It looked positively regal. Around the rim of the plate raced crinkled ribbons of variously hued cabbages.

I had wondered if the traditionally hot-hotvindaloo treatment would undercut the pork’s quality, but the meat was so full-flavored that the relatively temperate tart-hot sauce pointed it up rather than tamping it down. Every time my palate started to overheat, I grabbed some of creamy yogurt rice to cool down. Good to the last bite.

About that pork: the meat is not eaten in most of India because of Hindu and Muslim dietary restrictions. But in Goa, the former Portuguese colony on India’s Malabar Coast, pork vindaloo is a Catholic dish of long standing. It is just the sort of regional specialty that Jaisinghani tends to highlight on her prix-fixe lunches. Such dishes rarely find their way into the lockstep repertoires of most Houston Indian restaurants.

Alison Cook

The hot, beautifully bubbled naan at Indika.

Another thing about that Revival Meats pork. It was raised from heirloom breeds in Yoakum, Texas, by Houstonian Morgan Weber, and its use is a testament to Jaisinghani’s determination to serve only humanely raised meats. She adopted this stance with no fanfare, lists her suppliers on her menu and doesn’t shrink from the extra cost and effort associated with securing such products, all of which makes her an unsung pioneer on the Houston restaurant scene. That’s part of what makes her $22 prix-fixe lunches a relative bargain.

Of course, the real reason this $22 lunch feels like a deal is the vividness of the flavors, the precision of the textures and the surprise of encountering unfamiliar dishes. Not to mention the small, complimentary details: the fragile pappadums to crunch up with gutsy tamarind chutney; the high-bubbled naan loaves, glossed with ghee and plucked from the tandoor at precisely the right scorchy moment; the delicate, short-textured cardamom cookies presented after the dessert course.

In fact, I had such a fine time checking out Indika’s prix-fixe lunch that I plan to do a blog series on such offers. I may get around to prix-fixe dinners, too. So stay tuned for the prix-fixe trials, coming soon to a digital venue near you. Why, just driving down the street from Indika, I spied a sign touting a three-course lunch special for 14 bucks from Tony Vallone’s new Caffe Bello. We shall see.